Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay is a book that I read in my twenties. It is one of the more famous books of its type, like Hans Zinsser's Rats, Lice, and History. Harris is narrating the section on witch persecution. Nothing like some Harris religion bashing to get me smiling.

Thirty-year-old Piotr Alekseevich Marakulin lives a contented, if humdrum life as a financial clerk in a Petersburg trading company. He is jolted out of his daily routine when, quite unexpectedly, he is accused of embezzlement and loses his job. This change of status brings him into contact with a number of women―the titular “sisters of the cross”―whose sufferings will lead him to question the ultimate meaning of the universe.

The first English translation of this remarkable 1910 novel by Alexei Remizov, one of the most influential members of the Russian Symbolist movement, Sisters of the Cross is a masterpiece of early modernist fiction.

Any idea on how he compares with other Russian Symbolists who were mentioned around this board?

Books I already plan to buy in 2018:
-Misanthropic Tales by S. Henry Berthoud (released within the year)
-50 Writers: An Anthology of 20th century Russian Short Stories
-The Great War for Civilization by Robert Fisk (already read on kindle, but I don't remember much so I'll have to double purchase).

"So in the end it remains advisable to accept whatever comes, to behave like an inert mass even if one feels oneself being swept away, not to be lured into a single unneccesary step, to regard others with the gaze of an animal, to feel no remorse, in short to crush with one's own hand any ghost of life that subsists, that is, to intensify the final quiet of the grave still further and let nothing beyond that endure." ---Franz Kafka, Resolutions